The conversation about Space in abstract painting, as all conversations do, has become a bit more personal and far ranging. It was inevitable. Words carry weight and if an artist is talking about one thing and doing another then things can be confusing. So in that spirit we take the comments/conversation into another public forum at Martin’s and Robin’s request.

“…we…are…artists who want to put back together what was torn asunder in painting over the last fifty years. We don’t ignore the ideas that motivated that deconstruction but work with them. There is a paring down of art to bare essences in the Greenbergian ethos of painting. And it extends to the point where artists start taking the very material and ground of the painting apart. Where does it end? The work of Kelley, Stella, Ryman, Tuttle and Richter, artists I’d like to label as artists of the ‘bare minimum’, informs our painting. They provide us with the iconic shapes and notions of canvas as sculpture set free by their research into the underpinnings of painting. But our plan is to do something different to them.”

It’s fairly easy in this way. Martin wants to show us work that understands and accepts the deconstruction of painting from Greenberg on to the present while perceiving/creating something “different” within that style. So do these works do this? What is different, what is this difference, how does it work?

“So why can we not see a contemporary equivalent happening in abstract painting now? Why are we revelling in the facile geometry and the easy-peazy gesture of dinky little abstract paintings that can be knocked off three at a time of a Sunday afternoon? Is the association with past radical politics blinding us to the reality of the work? Why are we so tolerant of the lack of any kind of ambition…?”

I think this explains a little of the difference in viewpoints here.

Our conversation on space – space in painting, space in sculpture, what it means at this moment in time, what it means for the future of both of these disciplines – shows that “change” is becoming a real concern. And I think this is the subtext of our discussion on Space – what could abstract painting become, what should abstract painting do to make itself new? And I don’t mean that in the Modern sense! So in this vein let’s see if this conversation will continue…

The discussion of John Seed’s article on new figurative art opened up a lively back and forth about the past, present and future and the direction of painting and sculpture. I thought we might continue in a new post directed specifically at the meaning and use of space in 21st century. I think that the way we approach space, understand it has to be thought through once again. Modernism for the most part relied on what would typically be understood as a flat landscape space. This had a great deal to do with the fact that abstraction was not interested in depicting space but using space. Illusion of any kind, except maybe in the case of optical illusion or accidental illusion, was verboten. For the Modernist there are only theoretical spaces, spiritual or “sublime” spaces, but never figurative ones.

Greenberg’s Neo-Modernism set the final distinctions for space in abstract painting, and taken to its logical outcome, brought painting to an exploration of its tools and techniques – materiality and process – a thing on the wall, a thing on the floor, or a thing in the room. One does not look “into” a painting, painting is no longer an image to be seen, but it is a thing to be encountered. It is a physical reality, a form made manifest, and if you’ll forgive me Robin, a near sculptural thing. For abstraction Minimalism is the endpoint, endgame. The logocentric form, the unassailed logic of the surface and side, the reneging of any kind of illusion brought abstraction into the Postmodern era.

Of course this grew up right along with appropriation and the proliferation of the lens-based image – the reproduced image, the found image, and/or the overlaid image – all of it aimed at the space of the Neo-Modern surface. Lens-based images were used as flat things to collage over the empty “billboard” maintaining the appearance of Neo-Modern space. What remained in this photo based art was process, materiality and of course flatness – the hallmarks of consumer production. In this case Murakami’s idea of the Superflat hits the nail on the head. This space is a hybrid of the Neo-Modern space elucidated by Greenberg and the Cold War aesthetics of Mad Man culture. Clem’s idea is that this is Kitsch space, and it’s manifested in the consumer culture developed in the 20th century. It’s in these spaces that the Pop artists were able to connect consumer culture to Modernist theoretics, where retro-painting of all kinds links to market spaces, where the economics of auction house art truly exists. None of this work is directed at physical vision. It is produced and manufactured like any other economic abstraction – like junk bonds, housing bubbles, quantitative easing, or derivatives. What we are talking about is the space of exchange value, where actual vision is not needed or expected, where physical encounters slow the flow of abstraction. This kind of space is meant for the screen, the lens and the program. Space that goes nowhere, defines nothing and is infinitely flat. Space designed not to be seen but to be sold.

This is where abstraction has come to in the 21st Century. And I think this is an interesting place to be. We have a chance to redefine vision in this new abstract environment, recreate abstract space, outside of the program. Robin Greenwood believes that painting cannot accomplish such thing without resorting to figurative means, and if I’ve read him correctly, abstraction cannot exist in a figurative space, at least not on canvas. For Robin, it is sculpture that has a better chance at redefining these abstract spaces, making them more “figurative,” let’s say. John Seed takes this a bit further and actually says that pictorial figuration is the key to moving on. He insists that we must look back to our history to find a precedent, some idea of vision that may make fleshy sense of the current spatial dilemma. And Martin Mugar agreed with this idea of our extensive history being a resource. His further point that one’s personal vision determines the processes for seeing and painting makes a great deal of sense to me. His article about Cezanne finding a specific technique related to both his hand and his eye is a wonderful elucidation of the way we might move forward and define a different kind of space, a more quirky and personal one.

Of course all of this is a simplistic wrap up of the discussion, but I think that we are rounding onto something interesting. So I throw it out there once again – what is space at this stage of abstraction’s development? Is it possible for painting to move ahead (or backward) to a different kind of space and would that include abstraction? Can painting rework the Modern legacy of those early years of the 20th Century and find a different idea of what space might look like here in the 21st Century? Can a figurative space exist with abstraction? As Robin and Martin stated, there were a lot of ideas left unexplored in the work of Matisse and Cezanne, (and I might add Picasso) ideas about space, form and composition that were never developed in the Modern Century. And I have to ask once again – is it possible to make abstract painting without the Modern legacy and what would that look like?

To begin: A special thanks to Henri Art Magazine for providing a new home for “Seen in New York” after the untimely demise of Abstract Critical. I’ve been genuinely enjoying chronicling the broad reemergence of abstract painting in New York, albeit in my own highly opinionated way, and it’s my goal to continue writing these round-ups in September and January when so many things open all at once.

The New Year got underway with a lot of hard-edged painting. I’ve been trying to figure out if there was actually more than there has been in the past couple of years, or it’s simply a case of my own taste acting a filter – the latter can’t be dismissed, but I think that it’s actually the former. Here are some of my favorite shows that opened in January:

Warren Isensee, Surface Noise, 2014. Oil on canvas, 60” x 60.”

Warren Isensee opened a particularly strong solo exhibition at Danese Corey. There were generally fewer of the labyrinthine compositions that I associate with Isensee’s work, in favor of more centralized compositions, many of which were stripped down to a confident and nervy simplicity. It’s not minimalist by any stretch, but he’s using the field as a kind of frame and ground simultaneously. This leaner approach with varied spatial readings was for me most effectively exemplified in Nine by Eleven from 2014, in which a flickering red grid floats in (or is surrounded by) a yellow field over a decidedly landscape-like brown bar at the bottom of the canvas. As to the more maximalist canvases on view, I particularly enjoyed Surface Noise from 2014. It was a rock solid, centrally composed grid, but the celebratory approach to color kept it from feeling static or rigid.

Mixed Greens started off the year with a group exhibition in which there were several painters I’ve admired for some time, plus some who were news to me. Anyone who’s read this column in the past knows how enthusiastic I am about Vince Contarino’s work. He had two small canvases in the show; Space Invaders form 2014 featured his signature blend of gestural and geometric – his greatest strength – and NT/NF/16, also 2014, was more of an uninterrupted field, something I haven’t seen from him before and that I would really like to see on a much larger scale. Suzanne Song contributed two tromp l’oeil abstractions (Slitslip and Centerfold, both 2014) in which the surfaces were built up in a thick, sandy relief. The painted shadows and the actual shadows cast by the impasto created a loopy confusion between the real and the illusionistic – these paintings were playful in the best possible sense. Even further into the realm of the impasto party was Zander Blom, whose candy colors and toothpaste application really should have been an undergrad disaster, but were instead quite terrific. He had four paintings in the show, and I tended to gravitate toward the more restrained compositions, even though lack of restraint was generally their key feature; Untitled (1.615) from 2014 was my favorite. I’ve always wondered whether Julie Opperman chose her painting style based on her name, but whatever the case may be her TH1225 from 2012 was the largest picture in the show and was a real stunner. Its flashing moiré patterns and paint smears together read like a gestural abstraction that had been run through a shredder and then reassembled.

Dan Walsh opened a museum-style 20-year retrospective at Paula Cooper, with paintings, drawings, and books made between 1994 and 2014. I’m always interested in agglomerations of this kind, because they invariably show the strength and evolution or conversely the limitations of an artist’s vision over time. The former was definitely on display here – Walsh started off with a quirky, personal take on geometric abstraction and has slowly pushed and pulled it into subtly different directions. Without ever really changing course from a fairly limited set of motifs, he’s achieved a surprising amount of variety. The two paintings from 2010 (at least one of which I remember seeing at the time) really stood out for me. The orange grid over a slightly wider maroon grid in Landing glowed with the intensity of a computer screen. Playing the fully saturated color against the more earthy underlying grid and the subtle warm grey ground activated the orange in a profound way. The framing elements at the top and sides (but not the bottom) gave it structure without boxing it in. Framing was also a key feature in Grotto, which conjured up Islamic architecture. The transparency of the yellow grid over the dark ground in the center read like light or projection, which created a nice tension against the solidity of the architectural references.

Kellyann Burns showed a convincing group of hard-edged abstractions at McKenzie Fine Art. The blocks of color were applied in layers then patiently and methodically scraped, sanded and reapplied – even the more uniform, opaque areas of color betrayed some small evidence of this continual re-working, and at their best there were shades of Hans Hoffman. There were essentially three ranges of scale, with the large paintings around 5’ high, and the small ones only 10.” I tended to respond to the medium size pictures best – their scale situated the viewer close enough to the surface to really appreciate the subtle undulations of color, but still gave the artist enough surface area to create nuance and surprise. I saw the show twice and both times was drawn straight to 8:29 PM 8/22/12 at 30” x 24.” The central color was hard to name and the smeared transparency at the bottom felt like it was in motion. The thin red bar at the top was a terrific way of completing the composition; it created a roof for the picture, but in a most understated way.

I’ve been very hesitant to wade in to the whole Zombie Formalism debate. Its central conceit (although never stated in this way) is that the visual lacks profundity; that some culturally urgent subject is what gives art its importance. The Cheyney Thompson show at Andrew Kreps seemed to me to unwittingly provide a great refutation of this position. These paintings of grids over grids, with pale digitization and tantalizing suggestions of the photographic within the stubbornly abstract, were fantastic – one of my favorite shows of the new year. I only later learned that the images were derived from “the random walk algorithm, a formalization of Brownian motion that is used in financial instruments to model market behavior” (quoted from the press release). This information neither added nor detracted anything to these wonderful paintings – its only significance being that it created a starting point for compelling images. It begins and ends with the visual for me and if that makes me a zombie, then so be it; I could spend a long time stiffly shambling back and forth in front of Thompson’s StochasticProcessPainting(84048 steps) = FunctionalPath(i)(840.48 meters). Being undead would render me blissfully ignorant of the information embedded in the picture’s title.

Clinton King, Almost Me, 2014. Oil on linen, 64” x 50.”

Clinton King was featured in the inaugural exhibition at Transmitter in Ridgewood, Queens with a solo show entitled “Open Ended,” comprised of seven 20” x 16” paintings and four that were 64” x 50”. The small ones were witty, but the large ones were terrific, and played with the gaps between the painterly illusion of depth and the literally two-dimensional in a variety of ways. The grounds in each were composed of somewhat wavy stripes in muted and subtly modulated colors that were softened and blended at the edges, and which conjured landscapes, seascapes, and cloudscapes – the traditional space (both literally and metaphorically) of painting from Poussin through impressionism. A loosely drawn faming element was added by what looked like a finger being smeared through the paint; the kind of drawing you might see someone make on a dirty or frosty car window. Added to this were simple compositions of thin black stripes, which were given subtle drop shadows – they seemed to float about ¼” above the picture plane. This index of spaces kept these deceptively simples paintings endlessly interesting. My favorite was Almost Me; it was the most saturated of the bunch, and the placement of the finger-painted smears and the black stripes were the reverse of the above description.

This piece is getting long, and I don’t want to test the patience of my new host, or you, the reader. So briefly:

Gary Petersen, Another Life, 2014. Acrylic on Canvas, 20” x 16.”

Gary Petersen opened a strong solo at Theodore:Art. The big draw was two large murals painted directly on the gallery walls, but I must say that the large assortment of small paintings really knocked me out. In the last year Petersen has added a few new motifs to his usual selection of stripes and frames, and they’re working. Look for Another Life from 2014, in which the planes, ellipses, and bands all posit different spatial vantage points. Siri Berg showed color-driven work from the 70s through the 90s at Hionas Gallery. The three lovely Kabballah paintings in the front were strongly influenced by minimalism yet still incredibly poetic. Sarah Eichner hung a nice group of op-inspired canvases at Sears Peyton. The obsessive, recessional space of Spectrum Flags and the layered perspective matrices of Spectrum Weave 3 were especially compelling. “Working Knowledge” was a large, ambitious group show in a bootstrappy, artist-run space called Lorimoto in Ridgewood, Queens. There was lots to like, but I was especially taken with contributions by Robert Otto Epstein, Ryan Dawalt, and Rob De Oude. Another strong group exhibition was “Elements” at Minus Space. There were solid paintings from Li Trincere, Cris Gianakos, Vincent Como, and the venerable Mark Dagley, but the real star was Rachel Beach – I generally don’t have much valuable insight into the discussion of sculpture, but her work is awfully hard to ignore.

“The problem is that the definition of avant-garde needs to be revised to encompass and include art and artists that are brave enough the reach backwards and forwards at the same time. The avant-garde of the future needs to feed itself with hybridization, consolidation and assimilation.

I think that painting has to look back over its shoulder to realist and academic painting before the Salon des Refusés; in fact, it can and should go all the way back to Lascaux if it needs to. I see the history of painting as a very long line with no beginning and no end.”

A Brief Rant on the Exhaustion of the Avant-Garde, Zombie Formalism and What Contemporary Painting Needs to Move Forward, John Seed, HuffPost, June 27, 2015.

I do not agree with all of the premises he suggests in the piece. Seed seems to think that representational work can offer us a way out. Though I love figurative art, I believe there needs to be a really different engagement with that history. “Representation” has to find some other kind of visual basis, some real visual urgency if it’s to have any relevance and innovation FOR us. The problem is that “representation” is ubiquitous. We are too enthralled with our lenses, too limited by the representation of reality that we see in our programs, too busy with our selfie sticks. Look, there is more contemporary “representation” stashed in my iPhone than I can take some days, and I certainly don’t want any of those images translated directly in paint! Especially not by an academic realist. And please, spare me the nude in the studio business. If you want a new kind of urgent Realism check out Adam Curtis’ Bitter Lake.

Additionally, technique and process are great, but that’s not going to move us forward! Perfecting a skill does not make for progressive art. Vision does. What pushed the early Modernists to innovate was the urge to understand new and different ways of seeing and understanding the times in which they lived. What they found was that they had to adapt old techniques in order to do it – laying differing colors side by side to create optical illusions was nothing new – Michelangelo did it on the Sistine ceiling centuries before, and the more contemporary Delacroix demanded a weird mottled color in his own Romantic visions. Maybe it’s all been done, but that’s no excuse. We must hone to our vision, to seeing, and do what that demands of us. Simple questions – how do we see the world, what do we actually see, and how does that define our lives? This will drive innovation backwards or forwards – it always has.

If we as artists do look back along the long history of art it must be in order to find something that can make sense of this moment, of our life in this time. And if we do find something that can work, this kind of “hybridized” work will look strange, clunky and uncomfortable to those schooled in the Postmodern academies. I agree with John. This should be a risk we painters should take – especially at this time!

Paul Corio, artist, painter and theorist, will continue his famous gallery round up right here on Henri. As many of you know Paul has been assiduously following the gallery scene in New York City, and writing some of the best criticism about painting and abstraction that you’ll find online. His first column will be posted shortly! Stay Tuned!

“What’s missing today is connoisseurship, and original thinking. People can’t be bothered. They don’t have time for it or they simply don’t care. No one has patience for listening and learning; high stakes art selling relies on creating the feeding frenzy that triggers an irrational impulse-buy. The market is fueled by pure hustle; the most successful dealers are the ones who are best at selling the sizzle, because no one gives a damn about the steak.”

The wonderful Orson Welles had a visceral image he would use for his recurring depression and worry. He would say the “Black Dog is barking.” And I think that’s an appropriate image for my past year. A nagging philosophical debate has been warring in my mind about the state of art, the state of the art world itself and if I want a place in it. I have found no true or false answers, no easy solutions, but quite frankly, I’ve grown tired of the tautologies and the solipsism. My barking dog has been relentless, tireless. I’m sure every artist goes through something like this at some point in their lives, a moment when one’s cherished philosophies must change in order for one to proceed – fight the fights worth fighting, let go everything else. But who knows, maybe it’ll all wind up in the dog house anyway.

Luxe, Calme et Volupté

For me there’s something deliciously decadent and hopeful about this image of Monsieur Matisse. There on the right a slightly disapproving, square-jawed matron sternly observes the scene – a drawing of a tangled figure and a painting of a movie set interior, a dog sleeping on the patterned abstraction. Matisse himself sits with a book (sketch book?), his feet casually crossed on the stacked leather pillows. There’s a bourgeois elegance to the image, a discrete artistic nonchalance and surprising bohemian excess that so few of us can carry off these days. And why should that be? Life and art exist at once in this picture. It’s as if Rauschenberg’s famous “gap” hasn’t yet taken hold of our imaginations. You know, that gap between art and life that opened up right after the AbExers ran out of steam in ’55. That gap that turned art making into art production. That gap that became synonymous with the Postmodern era.

Wanting

Dave Hickey is famous for espousing the 40 year law of art – after 40 years it’s permissible to start stealing from the art of that particular era. He then added the proviso that if you thought that the particular 40 year old art in question still sucked, then you had his permission to go back further and steal from an era where the art did not suck. What Dave didn’t explicitly say was that when one does this one has to make that stolen art one’s very own. It’s not enough to just add your signature. For those who want to make art that does not suck stealing is not just about the patina of age, the legitimacy of an art form or the nostalgia for a golden era. Instead it’s about the life and excitement of an idea. Stealing in this sense becomes more like a biblical coveting, something illicit, a sin. It’s like sneaking around with your neighbor’s sloe-eyed spouse or joy riding in a smokin’ hot Little Red Corvette that you picked up in a 7/11 parking lot. Nor is this kind of stealing about the academic “exigencies of desire” or our contemporary mania for appropriating and curating, which to my mind look more like mergers and acquisitions rather than passionate assignations. No, we are not looking to expand our fiscal holdings or do away with a bothersome market competitor. We are not looking for synergies or symbiosis.

What we are looking for, what we are doing is actually involving ourselves in the provenance of the stolen goods, actually folding them into our lives so that they become ours, become part of us; inviolate, inseparable, whole. We’re interested in the life of an idea, not signatures or attributions. This requires actually embodying these non-sucking things, right out there in the open for all to see. It’s something that David Shields called Reality Hunger – the need we experience for authenticity, reality. We are not disguising our stolen properties, our stolen kisses and thick assignations through shell corporations or wholly owned subsidiaries. We do not curate them to a wall so that our Instagram will look interesting to instantaneous clickers. Instead, we who steal cherish what it is that we have stolen. We enfold those things, make them our very own, keep them FOR us rather than for others. In other words stolen things should be “cloud”-less. So maybe this 40 year law is not about time or eras or the past at all, but about the sucking…

Rocket Raccoon: Question. What if I see something that I wanna take and it belongs to someone else?Rhomann Dey: Then you will be arrested.Rocket Raccoon: But what if I want it more than the person who has it?Rhomann Dey: Still illegal.Rocket Raccoon: That doesn’t follow. No, I want it more, sir. Do you understand me? What are you laughing at? What? I can’t have a discussion with this gentleman?

Who would have thought that an animated raccoon would define what it means to be an artist? A thief who wants it more. Not someone looking to corner a market or come up with a gimmick. But someone who just wants it more. For instance – shouldn’t we want abstraction to be more than it has been? Shouldn’t we want painting to be more than it has been? Shouldn’t we want more ideas that challenge the status quo? Shouldn’t we want artists who love art more, not artists trying to prove a point? For me that means Modernist art, the Postmodern era, the Neo-Liberal Economic Fun Base of professional artists everywhere has to be challenged again and again until the penny drops. It also means throwing the baby out with the bath water – no more Modernism or recombinant Modernism in any form – period. Make an abstraction, a sculpture, a video, whatever, without the Modern tropes. Think! Do! Be! 40 years, Hell! Go back to just before the 1860s and find a contemporary abstraction in that!

Look, do we really need to sit in awe of things like this – “Billionaires Chasing Warhols Fuel $16 Billion Art Sales.”- for yet another year? Nope! I was finally able to get my black dog to sleep soundly on my abstractions, and for the moment, he seems fairly at ease. At least he’s not barking so loudly any longer, though he does growl now and then.

On September 15, 2008 Damien Hirst held an auction that officially ended the theoretical legacy of the 20th Century. One can honestly say that Damien’s Day was such a pivotal moment in our Post-historical culture that one can actually track “the before” and “the after” from it. Part of the reason for this watershed moment was the stock market crash that happened on the same day, but let’s not quibble. Yes, there’s been some jostling about this event in the press, but for the most part, it seems, that most of us have just folded this information right into our everyday existence and gone on like nothing had happened. What I’m on about is the fact that on that day the criteria for determining what art actually IS irrevocably changed. Art is now produced, manufactured, valued, traded and admired from an entirely different set of criteria. The old fashioned idea that art should be appraised and vetted through its aesthetic influences, theoretical challenges and art historical importance no longer matters one wit. Instead our long held tenets, those valued by the Modern movement, espousing innovation, aesthetic challenge and radical style change have become passé. Contemporary Art has become more like a financial product, and it’s appraised through market values and economic realities in the same way that a commodity or security is valued. In other words the very concept of Art itself has become redundant.

The rank and file shows go on, of course, as do the polemics (like this one), the discussions, the defenses, the debates. Most of us continue to believe that traditional art concerns still exist, still have meaning for the culture. We blithely indulge in the rehearsed historic programs. We continue to believe in the “power” of style or theoretical daring. Yet, real visual difference remains as elusive as Bigfoot. Our art remains structured around the tenets of Modernism. And this is because we have done none of the things that defined Modernism. The last 50 years of recombinant Postmodern pastiches have created a mannered, clever, impersonal Modernism-Lite. We produce handsome and professional work to be sold in the endless seasonal cycles of art commerce. Our works have become so similar, in fact, that we have come to rely on “name recognition” in order to distinguish them. Thus the rise of the brand name artist, the insatiable quest for media coverage, the personal appearances, the cross branding with entertainment/fashion corporations, etc…

For the most part we all perform in the circus and hope to make a living from it. So we play to the audience’s expectations. We make our works bigger, we pump up the mechanics, reorganize the formulae, or if we’re really feeling expressive, we rub a bit of stank onto something that we find a bit outré. We re-mix, we appropriate, we curate our work into existence from a well-mined history of style. All of it ready for purchase, prêt-à-porter. Culture has come to seem so very rehearsed and familiar, so very predictable, and as Derrida wrote; always-already. And it’s the fact that the culture actually is familiar that makes contemporary art so accessible, so approachable, so “classic.” Koons’ balloon dogs, a mixture of Pop insouciance, Modern classicism and Disney World fabrication play to one’s Postmodern entertainment sensibilities. Hirst’s dots are just that, dots, tastefully riffing on the mechanics of a Modern abstract grid painting. Fischer’s squished clay balls art blown up to gargantuan proportions so one can see his giant-sized fingerprints, a clever pun on Rodin’s “Hand of God.” Josh Smith painting at breakneck speeds whips out a cheesy palm tree landscape in lurid drippy colors accessing both “bad” painting and the history of just plain bad painting. All of it is handsome, smart, light, expensive and tastefully accessible to those schooled in the rudiments of 20th Century culture. Nothing we haven’t seen before, experienced before, or confronted before, and all of it presented to us as if the ground has opened beneath our feet. And the best part is that all of this work looks like Art! The product delivery systems of our art market work overtime to apply a sheen of Madison Avenue glamour and class aimed at the collectors and the publicity outlets. In other words the hierarchy of the gallery system elevates the “status” and “prestige” of the work we see, like a Prada showroom designed by Rem Koolhaus or Lady Gaga trained as an acolyte by Marina Abramovic. The brands collide in a perfect consuming spectacle.

This new art economy has been transformative, especially in our studios. The “subject matter” of Art, what the narrative might entail, the engagement and poetry of the work, are all incidental to the market value, the means of production and delivery, and the branded import of the art object itself. Today, the most “innovative art” foregoes the avant-garde debates over style change or aesthetic transformation that once raged at the Deux Magots or the Cedar Bar. Rather, our innovators’ “arguments” revolve mostly around business problems, particularly “fair use” and “copyright infringement.” We have been transfixed by the legalities and finances of business, preferring them to issues of aesthetics. Our culture in other words is being determined by institutions whose only skin in our game tends to revolve around who is allowed to profit and for how much. So the art we see remains static, familiar, all too familiar, in the same way that “New Urbanist” communities, drive-time radio shows, Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issues, 70s fashion statements, and slow motion videos projected on gallery walls are familiar. All of this re-purposing of legally sanctioned processes, of “fair use,” has no real influence on the direction of art itself, but it does create and maintain markets and money. It’s in this way that our contemporary recombinant culture, our Retro-Culture, actually upholds and supports the stability and continuity needed for a thriving economic market.

Most of the Moderns would have found this idea of a purely market driven Art, our Neo-Liberal Art World, incomprehensible. Aside from the fact that they were nearly all lefties, and in some cases, Communists, their main focus was to overthrow the societal/cultural powers then in existence. The avant-garde was experimenting with new aesthetic ideas and iconoclastic theoretics, but mostly, the Moderns wanted to assert the power, sovereignty and worth of individuals, every individual, through new modes of expression, through “emotion.” Nearly every manifesto of those early years lays out this very idea. And this focus on emotion, on emotional connection to vision, was the last and only humanist position an artist should take in the face of unrestrained technological advancement. Think of it. In 40 years, from the first air flight at Kitty Hawk to the breaking of the sound barrier in the Mojave Desert, the world experienced two world wars, a devastating plague, a global economic cataclysm and the splitting of the atom. In the face of these unprecedented challenges a small, engaged and aggressive avant-garde desperately focused on what it meant to be human, what it meant to feel. In the end, however, it wasn’t enough. How could it be? Modernism’s human challenge to the uncompromising technological expansion failed as governments, bureaucracies, institutions and corporations re-formed human existence, captured, categorized and contained humanity. Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Holocaust effectively ended the Modern movement, and with it, the Modern avant-garde. The Postmodern age would be different, more “practical.” And so it began with a portrait of a Coca-Cola bottle.

“If art cannot tell us about the world we live in then I don’t believe there’s much point in having it. And that is something that we’re going to have to face more and more as the years go on, that nasty question that never used to be asked, because the assumption was that it was answered long ago. What good is art? What use is art? What does it do? Is what it does actually worth doing? And an art that is completely monetized the way that its getting these days is going to have to answer these questions or it’s going to die.” Robert Hughes, “The Mona Lisa Curse”, 2008.

Damien’s Day finally defined the idea that artists are no longer Modern or Postmodern, but simply put, Modernist. And the distinction to be made is found in the way we use the 20th century legacy to make our work. We have no interest in overcoming the Modern, moving beyond it, challenging its theoretics. We do not ask questions, we do not take the 20th Century legacy to task for its failings, for its obvious capitulations, its formulaic visual engagements. We’re, all of us, true believers. We believe that the Modern was correct, its look correct, that its processes and techniques continue to define our time, that its tenets and aesthetics are sanctified, deserve our continued support and allegiance. We are Modernists in the same way that Capitalists, Socialists, Christianists or Islamists unquestioningly believe in the rightness of their tenets, in their right to power. And like them we use our unquestioning belief in the Modern as a path to power, as a monetary right, as an a priori economic artistic precept. And so we continue to ply its long dead principles in our paintings and sculptures, in our theatre and film, in our writing and poetry, and mostly, in our programs and technologies.

I began the current series of articles on Henri Art Magazine entitled “Untethered” in order to find a different take on the Modern Century. I’m still forming my understanding, still open to ideas, but my discontent with our current Modernist era has hardened as I’ve asked questions of the past. I do not have any illusions about what that means, especially when confronting the massive economic order that determines what art is. And I don’t mean for any of this critique to be taken as a paranoid fantasy or a screed from a reactionary. The new paradigm of a purely economically driven art based on the tropes of the 20th Century is the reality and inevitability of our time. That said, I am more convinced than I ever was that Art, and especially for me, abstract painting, must decisively and firmly untether itself from the 20th Century. I am adamant that we find a new humanism within the program, a new way to assert one’s ideas, to innovate, to express, to feel, to create vision, without the strictures of economics and without the worn out and flaccid Modern legacy. It is the only way we will find something new. And so I leave you with a few questions.

Why must we continue to ply the 20th Century’s outdated principles, its tropes, techniques and factures, its cartographic spaces and flat worldview? Why must we follow the rules of Postmodern Art Commerce? Why must we believe and accept that Modernist art, the art preferred by the corporate plutocracy, should set OUR debate, should set the “standards of excellence” for artists today? Why is there so little art, especially abstraction, that directly engages in what it means to be alive, to be human in this, our time, the way Picasso, Matisse, or for that matter Monet and Manet, did in their time? Why do we not innovate instead of transform? Why can we not discuss the way we SEE the world using new abstract images, different visions, rather than continue to make familiar recombinations of Modern productions? Why do we not really question the legacy we all so blindly follow? And as Robert Hughes so succinctly put it, why have we not asked these questions of our work?